Danger is the shark in shallow waters, the pills in the cupboard or a grand piano teetering on a window ledge while children skip below. It is the diet too rich in cre

Instantly charmed - imagine a technically literate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle.

Danger is the shark in shallow waters, the pills in the cupboard or a grand piano teetering on a window ledge while children skip below. It is the diet too rich in cream, the base-jump, the booze, the pedestrian and the double-decker, driving a car fast or the threat of weirder weather. It is the spills and the thrills. In other words, danger is everywhere and always. And in all cases we find those same two faces: one impassive, formal, calculating, the other full of human hopes and fears.

The unusual aim of this book is to see both at once. We hope to show people and their stories and the numbers, together. We set out to do this mainly to explore how these two perspectives compare, but along the way we found that this raised an awkward question: are the two faces of risk compatible? Can risk claim to be true to the numbers and to you at the same time? We will present both sides as we try to find out, but we will tell you our conclusion now. It can’t. For people, probability doesn’t exist.

There's a Pratchettian lightness and gravity to it (it's a lot like the best of The Science of Discworld, in fact - fiction and nonfiction, tragic comedy, grandeur and quotidian life).

Norm's habits are ordinary, he likes a nice cup of tea but not too many, wears M&S trousers and invites little risk from hot passion or daring. Even so, someone or something wants him dead. Norm’s entire, blameless life is a story of mortal danger, as to some extent is yours, and ours.

One of the most important genres is the romance of technology, the emotional translation of rational truths, e.g. the Law of Large Numbers:

from above, the course of human destiny is often clear. To individuals below, it is a maze of stories. It is as if there are two forces at the same time: one at the big scale pulling towards certainty, the other pushing individuals towards uncertainty. There’s a word to describe this balance between the patterns of populations and the stumbling of a single soul, a word first used in its modern sense only a few hundred years ago: probability.

The micromort and microlife concepts (the latter invented herein) could seriously improve people's lives. by allowing precise prioritisation. Without them, without the help of reason in general, we are doomed to have the wrong emotions, or the right emotions with the wrong strength, or the right emotions for bad reasons....more
"

Gavin said:
"
Casual, brief and witty theoretical economics. Actually a unification of economics, political science, and this other thing.

The prose is deceptively plain, like say Anscombe. There's basically no data, it's all intuition pumps. (But I share most of Casual, brief and witty theoretical economics. Actually a unification of economics, political science, and this other thing.

The prose is deceptively plain, like say Anscombe. There's basically no data, it's all intuition pumps. (But I share most of his intuitions, which surprised me.)

Some key premises:* Nonmarket forces matter. * Dissent helps us. It is extremely rich data for anyone who cares about doing good work, and so lasting. * If there were only rational (critical and disloyal) customers, the economy would collapse. * Exit (market pressure) and Voice (nonmarket pressure). * (TODO (...) )

I've never seen such a clear analysis of nonmarket forces - and since I find them ugly and hopeless traps for activists, it's good to be challenged.

He cracks open a massive neglected topic: we had studied macroeconomic slack (depressions, where your whole system is suddenly sluggish and unresponsive) extensively, but not microeconomic slack - Why don't firms maximise output, in healthy macro regimes? Because they're made of individuals who don't? Because of internal conflict requiring suboptimal compromises? Because it serves a latent function?

There's also a surprising focus on social / personal decay - the idea that our new productive power allows for an unprecedented range of decadence, failures, mutation load... There's certainly some evidence for that. But also selection-as-repair and post-traumatic growth:

Firms and other organisations are conceived to be permanently and randomly subjected to decline and decay. This radical pessimism, which views decay as an ever-present force constantly on the attack, generates its own cure; for as long as decay is hardly in undisputed command at all times, it is likely that the very process of decline activates certain counter-forces.

Read it slowly. I found it really clear, but I don't know if that's because I'm already fairly grounded in economics.

He has a touching pride in political science, in a 1950s Apollonian way, and much of this criticises economists' costly bias in favour of exit:

I hope to demonstrate to political scientists the usefulness of economic concepts and to economists the usefulness of political concepts. This reciprocity has been lacking in recent interdisciplinary work as economists have claimed that the concepts developed for the purpose of analyzing phenomena of scarcity and resource allocation can be successfully used for explaining political phenomena as diverse as power, democracy and nationalism. They have thus succeeded in occupying large portions of the neighbouring discipline.

Has the field since done much to vindicate this pride?

The best argument against Exit, which I usually favour, is that it speeds up and deepens a group's decay: the people who get sick of drama and then leave are likely to be the more thoughtful and virtuous.

Worth serious study, but if all you take from this review is taking both market and nonmarket forces seriously, and thinking about when to use each, then it's still likely to be some help....more
"

and has a bit more on McCarthy &/vs Arendt for you. (The prose is exquisitely academic though, almost self-parody.)

I noticed the same tension you notice in an anthology of eC20th women poets. Half of the included refused to be anthologised as "women poets", so there was just an awkward blank left at the end of their chapters....more
"

I wrote this book because this history has never been as well-known as it deserves to be, at least outside certain isolated precincts of New York. Biographies had been written of all of them and devoured by me. But as biographies do, each book c...

I know that there is no [demiurge], but what if I were wrong? I am not, but I could be, but I am not, though I may be.

A wall has been built, and it is being built; we think it will continue to be built. No one knows exactly who started the wall, th

I know that there is no [demiurge], but what if I were wrong? I am not, but I could be, but I am not, though I may be.

A wall has been built, and it is being built; we think it will continue to be built. No one knows exactly who started the wall, though many have helped. Nor does anyone know how far it reaches: it seems to go on and on forever. We think the builders are our principals.

The wall is to protect us from the invasion. Wall soldiers man the wall. Whenever a soldier is overcome by an invader, he must be replaced by a stronger soldier, & we are forever sending replacements. We have even sent soldiers to man the wall in the distant provinces. No one knows how strong the enemy forces are there. We need as many soldiers as we can get, but we want only those who are strong enough to repel an invader. It is possible that there is a man strong enough to repel an invader. We know if a man isn't strong enough if he is overcome by an invader. But if he is not, we don't know whether it is because he is strong enough, or good fortune has kept stronger invaders away.

We have found a section of the wall where the invaders are too strong for anyone weaker than K. So we know that no man weaker than K will do there. For the time being we risk it: we judge that K is strong enough. Perhaps someday K may have to be replaced. Yes, we know that. Meanwhile we stare at the long reaches of the wall and wonder.

I no longer find coherentism even the kind of thing that would constitute an answer to the question "what is knowledge? / what is justification?". But this is so beautiful....more

And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values

Despite appearances, it's not light fiction. It covers the impossibility of making people happy, the absurd birth and death of a robot without senses, the arbitrariness of power. The shadow of the Soviets falls on the stories quite hard.

Trurl notarizes, issues directives, the typewriter chatters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, portfolios and pigeonholes, foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say “No Admittance,” inkwells, forms on file, writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don’t understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified with return receipt, or, best of all, remittance due and payable in full- he sends out no end of dunning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special accounts set up, no entries at the moment but he says that’s only temporary. After a while, you can see that that is not quite so hideous, especially in profile - it’s actually gotten smaller!-yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now? “No idle talk permitted on the premises,” is his answer. And he staples, stamps, inspects vouchers, revokes licenses, dots an I, loosens his tie, asks who’s next, I’m sorry, the office I closed, come back in an hour, the coffee is cold, the cream sour, cobwebs from ceiling to floor, an old pair of nylons in the secretary’s drawer, install four new file cabinets over here, and there’s an attempt to bribe an official, a pile of problems and a problem with piles, a writ of execution, incarceration for miscegenation, and appeals with seven seals. And the typewriter chatters: “Whereas, pursuant to the Tenant’s failure to, quit and surrender the demised premises in compliance with the warrant served habee facias posessionem, by Div. of Rep. Cyb. Gt. KRS thereof, the Court of Third Instance, in vacuo and ex nihilo, herewith orders the immediate vacuation and vacation thereunder. The Tenant may not appeal this ruling. Trurl dispatches the messenger and pockets the receipts. After which, he gets up and methodically hurls the desks, chairs, rubber stamps, seals, pigeonholes, etc., out into deep space. Only the vending machine remains. “What on earth are you doing??” cry the Steelypips in dismay, having grown accustomed to it all. “How can you?” “Tut-tut, my dears,” he replies. “Better you take a look instead!” And indeed, they look and gasp-why, there’s nothing there, it’s gone, as if it had never been! And where did it go, vanished into thin air? It beat a cowardly retreat, and grew so small, so very small, you’d need a magnifying glass to see it. They root around, but all they can find is one little spot, slightly damp, something must have dipped there, but what or why they cannot say, and that’s all. “Just as I thought,” Trurl tells them. “Basically, my dears, the whole thing was quite simple: the moment it accepted the first dispatch and signed for it, it was done for. I employed a special machine, the machine with a big B, for, as it is the Cosmos in the Cosmos, no one’s licked it yet!” “All right, but why throw out the documents and pour out the coffee?” they ask. “So that it wouldn’t devour you in turn!”

how do you [humans] build your progeny?" asked the [robot] princess.

"In faith, we do not build them at all," said Ferrix, "but program them statistically, according to Markov's formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing what­ever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit."

Kandel's translation (from the Polish) is maybe the greatest I've ever seen: hundreds of puns, neologisms, fake academese, and absurd alliterative names, all rendered into English without slips or missed opportunities. I read this over a month, savouring.

And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values

Despite appearances, it's not light fiction. It covers the impossibility of making people happy, the absurd birth and death of a robot without senses, the arbitrariness of power. The shadow of the Soviets falls on the stories quite hard.

Trurl notarizes, issues directives, the typewriter chatters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, portfolios and pigeonholes, foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say “No Admittance,” inkwells, forms on file, writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don’t understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified with return receipt, or, best of all, remittance due and payable in full- he sends out no end of dunning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special accounts set up, no entries at the moment but he says that’s only temporary. After a while, you can see that that is not quite so hideous, especially in profile - it’s actually gotten smaller!-yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now? “No idle talk permitted on the premises,” is his answer. And he staples, stamps, inspects vouchers, revokes licenses, dots an I, loosens his tie, asks who’s next, I’m sorry, the office I closed, come back in an hour, the coffee is cold, the cream sour, cobwebs from ceiling to floor, an old pair of nylons in the secretary’s drawer, install four new file cabinets over here, and there’s an attempt to bribe an official, a pile of problems and a problem with piles, a writ of execution, incarceration for miscegenation, and appeals with seven seals. And the typewriter chatters: “Whereas, pursuant to the Tenant’s failure to, quit and surrender the demised premises in compliance with the warrant served habee facias posessionem, by Div. of Rep. Cyb. Gt. KRS thereof, the Court of Third Instance, in vacuo and ex nihilo, herewith orders the immediate vacuation and vacation thereunder. The Tenant may not appeal this ruling. Trurl dispatches the messenger and pockets the receipts. After which, he gets up and methodically hurls the desks, chairs, rubber stamps, seals, pigeonholes, etc., out into deep space. Only the vending machine remains. “What on earth are you doing??” cry the Steelypips in dismay, having grown accustomed to it all. “How can you?” “Tut-tut, my dears,” he replies. “Better you take a look instead!” And indeed, they look and gasp-why, there’s nothing there, it’s gone, as if it had never been! And where did it go, vanished into thin air? It beat a cowardly retreat, and grew so small, so very small, you’d need a magnifying glass to see it. They root around, but all they can find is one little spot, slightly damp, something must have dipped there, but what or why they cannot say, and that’s all. “Just as I thought,” Trurl tells them. “Basically, my dears, the whole thing was quite simple: the moment it accepted the first dispatch and signed for it, it was done for. I employed a special machine, the machine with a big B, for, as it is the Cosmos in the Cosmos, no one’s licked it yet!” “All right, but why throw out the documents and pour out the coffee?” they ask. “So that it wouldn’t devour you in turn!”

how do you [humans] build your progeny?" asked the [robot] princess.

"In faith, we do not build them at all," said Ferrix, "but program them statistically, according to Markov's formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing what­ever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit."

Kandel's translation (from the Polish) is maybe the greatest I've ever seen: hundreds of puns, neologisms, fake academese, and absurd alliterative names, all rendered into English without slips or missed opportunities. I read this over a month, savouring.

If a critical mass of people with new priorities were to emerge, and if these people were seen to do well, in every sense of the term -- if their cooperation with each other brings reciprocal benefits, if they find joy and fulfillment in their live

If a critical mass of people with new priorities were to emerge, and if these people were seen to do well, in every sense of the term -- if their cooperation with each other brings reciprocal benefits, if they find joy and fulfillment in their lives -- then the ethical attitude will spread, and the conflict between ethics and self-interest will have been shown to be overcome, not by abstract reasoning alone, but by adopting the ethical life as a practical way of living and showing that it works, psychologically, socially, and ecologically...

One thing is certain: you will find plenty of worthwhile things to do. You will not be bored or lack fulfillment in your life. Most important of all, you will know that you have not lived and died for nothing, because you will have become part of the great tradition of those who have responded to suffering by trying to make the world a better place.

I've read a lot of Singer, mostly papers and columns and distilled arguments, not books. I can't remember not wanting to life an altruistic life, so I don't know exactly how much influence he had on me - but I'm a tithing vegan with a lot of respect for evolutionary arguments, who bites many utilitarian bullets, so it's probably plenty.

Clear, unflinching, inspiring. Reading this, it's easy to see why the heroes of a fantasy novel could be called Singers.

"
Yes! I liked it, but it is already in need of a second edition because of the statistical frailty of the rest of the field. (His research is fine, butYes! I liked it, but it is already in need of a second edition because of the statistical frailty of the rest of the field. (His research is fine, but...)

Engrossing, a great charitable reconstruction of a terrible age. Besides the subtle portrayal of the latent Reformation revolution, there's also a far more important upheaval: the rise of brilliant laymen and potent commoners (e.g. More and Cromwell)Engrossing, a great charitable reconstruction of a terrible age. Besides the subtle portrayal of the latent Reformation revolution, there's also a far more important upheaval: the rise of brilliant laymen and potent commoners (e.g. More and Cromwell), that is, the beginning of the end of feudalism.

Never been very interested in the Tudors. Henry is fickle and narcissistic even compared to other early Modern monarchs, and Anne is a boring climber. He appeared to set off a revolution for no better reason than he was too sexist to accept a female heir. Mantel shows how Henry, Anne and Katherine are a microcosm of their time - Mother Church vs the nationalism-Protestantism complex, and England slowly tearing itself away from former to latter. The first Brexit.

It's an imperfect model - Henry still burns un-Catholic books and men, and Luther and Tyndale don't support the shady divorce (against their own interests). A mixture of lust, opportunism, influence from competent rebels (Cromwell, Cranmer)?

Most characters are portrayed as pragmatic and modern, prayer aside. They know most relics are bogus, that the "medicine" of the day is hazardous, that the Church's decisions are deeply contingent and political, and they mock the superstitious lord who believes in ghosts. This is probably going too far, but it makes for great fiction.

The treatment of More vs Cromwell is the reverse of that in A Man for All Seasons: here Cromwell is a rational, catholic, and empathetic gent, while More is a scary authoritarian fundamentalist, closer to a Daesh jihadi than Rowan Williams.

[Cromwell] can’t imagine himself reading [the Bible] to his household; he is not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More, a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod - without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you have learnt, confirm you in what you have believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away, a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

Mantel has a funny way of letting her grammar show that Cromwell is The Man - she'll use "he" to mark him, even when this breaks the normal "pronouns refer to the most recent subject of that gender" convention. This is disorienting, but I appreciate the effect.

I was recently baffled by this sentence, from a contemporary American evangelical: "I was baptised Catholic before I became a Christian." The violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is the nastiest evidence of the power and horror of the narcissism of small differences.

I liked the book recommendations, the 16th Century equivalents of discussions on here. It is so hard to know, from 500 years away, what's worth reading. Though I suppose the real C16th dross is dead, all out of print, unarchived, unextant. For instance:

Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates.

This bit was funny:

When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; now a days the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

He's talking about a time with ~0.1% annual growth, starting from very little; where new books per year was still in the three digits; where new actual insights per year was probably lower, where it takes an entire month and ~thousands of pounds for one troll to even partially foul a discussion.

“Human beings differ from other animals because they are sufficiently intelligent to wish that they could stop working and reasoning – and free enough to toil harder than other creatures to pursue both these aims in order to eventually enjoy free time.

It follows that Homo faber and Homo sapiens are only contingent consequences of the truly essential Homo ludens. The fact that philosophers do not typically endorse this view only clarifies why they rarely qualify as champions of common sense…”
―
Luciano Floridi,
Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction

“John [McCarthy]'s world is a world of ideas, a world in which ideas don't belong to anyone, and in which, when an idea is wrong, just the idea – not the person – is wrong. A world in which ideas are like young birds, and we catch them and proudly show them to our friends. The bird's beauty and the hunter's are distinct...

Some people won't show you the birds they've caught until they are sure, certain, positive that they – the birds, or themselves – are gorgeous, or rare, or remarkable. When your mind can separate yourself from it, you will share it sooner, and the beauty of the bird will be sooner enjoyed.”
―
Richard Gabriel

“The craft of programming gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men, providing five kinds of joys:

• The joy of making things; • The joy of making things that are useful to other people; • The fascination of fashioning puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts; • The joy of always learning, of a nonrepeating task; • The delight of working in a medium so tractable — pure thought-stuff — which nevertheless exists, moves, and works in a way that word-objects do not.”
―
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr.

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